Condensed stories, words and found objects, put together to create new content and combined with pictorial motifs on postcards. The Center for Persecuted Arts is showing 220 literary and visual collages by Herta Müller: “On each card, the text with the picture is placed on a stage, each card stages its small theatre.”

“Shortly after I came from Romania, I traveled a lot. I wanted to check in with friends and looked for postcards in the places I was just visiting. But the black and white cards had stupid sayings that were meant to be funny. And the postcards had such dreadfully failed colors. Even the sky was thick blue on all of them, the trees a thick green, the roofs a thick red. One day I bought white index cards, a glue stick and started cutting out a black and white picture and words from the newspaper with nail scissors on the train. I then stuck the picture and a few words onto a card: THE STUBBORN WORD SO, OR IF THERE REALLY IS A PLACE IT TOUCHES ON THE DESIRE, OR THE PICKPOCKET THAT IS ME. I was baffled because individual words tell an entire story. Because a few words reveal something puzzling, because the little still suggests all sorts of things - a whole story continues, I noticed, precisely because it's not on the card. The lyrics were getting longer and longer. Stories were created using different colors and fonts. The lyrics sound because the different colors sound the words and the different sizes give them a different voice.

The longer I worked with the words, the longer the glued texts became. It is now a matter of course for me to write with found words. Because they come from very different magazines, their diversity makes the texts sensual. It is the most intensive contact with language because you have to touch every word individually. In general, this work is sensual. And in many ways it is similar to real life: the coincidence by which the words meet; more than the size of the card doesn't count; once stuck, you can no longer change. I've had some words for years now and you can tell from their paper that they've grown old. And when I'm out and about, I know that all my words are waiting for me at home. Sometimes I think that they too are waiting in their drawers, like me at train stations, that they can finally get into a text. Another time I think they're happy to have gotten away with it again and to be able to stay in the drawer with the others. Because I actually saved them. The whole gluing may have something to do with my previous time in Romania. The fact that there are countless colorful magazines, so good paper, so many texts that are only read fleetingly and thrown away — I didn't know any of this in Romania. There were only gray state newspapers smelly of lubricating oil, nothing else. Just turning the page gave you black fingers.” — Herta Müller

The Solingen exhibition of collages by Herta Müller will then be shown at the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow.

Responsible curator and curator: Delfina Jałowik and Jürgen Kaumkötter

Hanser Verlag is publishing a book of the latest collages to accompany the exhibition.